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Pride And Prejudice has one of the finest openings in English Literature - “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” What I liked best about this book was that a great deal of it was devoted to the corollary, a single man’s want of a good fortune, in the case of Jane Austen’s male relatives, and the means they adopted to get one; including an exhaustive (and exhausting) catalog of her male relatives’ connections. A book that was supposedly about Jane Austen was more like look at how wonderful her male relatives were.
That is the main charm of this work, the indirect view it affords of the environmental constraints that Jane Austen had to operate in; a confirmation of the relentless chase for social advantage by her contemporaries, and of the shade that women of great ability had to grow within.
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